Of highwaymen, muses and such things ...

http://kagaminoir.deviantart.com/art/Details-The-Highwayman-390021893

I am blame Alfred Noyes for my slight obsession with highwaymen. I fell in love with his poem The Highwayman when I was very young. I found it in an old red book of fairy tales and poems my mother owned as a child. It was titled The Children's Treasure House and a treasure house it was, full of stories of adventure, love, sorrow, loss, redemption. Some stories in this delightful book, I had never seen anywhere else (e.g. The White Cat), at least, not until the advent of the internet.

The Highwayman captured me from the opening line and held me until the end. It ticked so many boxes. Moonlight. Desolate moors. Horses. Men in 18th-century clothing (even at a young age I was fascinated by 18th-century clothing, especially velvet coats and high boots). Love. Ghosts. Bad guys. Good guys. A brave woman. And then there was the skill of the poem's construction, something I did not understand then, but to which I was instinctively drawn.

The rhyme and metre of the The Highwayman is outstanding. It gallops along but is not afraid to pause restlessly when the story calls for it. The heart of the tale is never lost, despite its fast pace, due to the repetition of words and ideas which continually connect the reader to the tragedy as it unfolds. The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse (Iona and Peter Ope (eds). Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 399.) claims that is is "the best narrative poem in existence for oral delivery."

Towards the end of his career, Noyes is quoted as saying, "I think the success of the poem... was because it was not an artificial composition, but was written at an age when I was genuinely excited by that kind of romantic story." (Alfred Noyes. Two Worlds for Memory. Philadelphia: J. B. Clipping, 1953, p. 38.)

That excitement certainly came through for this young reader, and inspired her to read books about highwaymen, smugglers and pirates from Daphne Du Maurier's Jamaica Inn to the worst of the pulp romances. I would only need to see the words 'Bodmin Moor' plus any of 'highwayman', 'smuggler' or 'pirate' and I would have to read that book.

I'm not so tempted nowadays though. Bodice rippers hold little appeal, and I'm often turned off a book by the purple prose summaries publishers use to sell such books (clearly, I am not their target market). Even my attitude to The Highwayman has changed somewhat. I still think it is a brilliant piece of poetry, but when younger I found it very romantic that he came racing back to avenge Bess's death. Now though, I want to slap him across the back of the head for being so stupid. What is wrong with you, sir! Bess gave her life to save you - and now you go and waste it by getting yourself killed? Sheesh!

Yet I'm still captured by the fantasy of the gentleman highwayman. It revisited me during the 80s when Adam Ant sang Stand and Deliver. It returned yet again in the course of writing to a prompt containing the words 'expand' and 'deliver' which saw the birth of a somewhat romantic highwayman muse.

I don't mind. If one's muse is going to be embodied as something, a dashing highwayman who loves you and supports your creativity is as good as anything else. Muses don't have to be women, do they? I mean, my main one is a white Eastern dragon. What's yours?